


accustom the eye to calmness

by syllic



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Family, Gen, Pre-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 15:58:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7764052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syllic/pseuds/syllic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They take the child away, too: Stacker glimpses her head in the crowd, and he’s able to catch the nametag on the uniform that takes her away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	accustom the eye to calmness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tielan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/gifts).



Stacker doesn’t know—he will go back to the moment, in dreams and in memories, and he will never know—what makes him look.

 

It’s unimaginable what your eyes will drift over in a jaeger. It’s not inability to see: even when your field of vision is all teeth and shining, unearthly skin, the spatter of blue against a building, it’s impossible not to see the people crushed underfoot, the slow drop of a chair from a 10th-story window that’s no longer there to keep the office furniture in. It’s never that the death and suffering are invisible, even from a giant’s vantage point; it’s that you cannot allow yourself to look, and so you don’t.

 

So Stacker isn’t surprised to catch the flash of red from the corner of his eye, out of the corner of Coyote Tango’s field of sight as the Jumphawks hover them over the street: what he will never be able to explain is how it is that his eyes come to rest on the shoe, that they catch sight of it and do not slide away.

 

Ninety seconds later Tamsin is a limp form next to him, limbs and slumped head held in place by the motion rig in a parody of wakefulness. There’s an empty, grey space in Stacker’s head, uncomfortable and anaesthetized. The Conn Pod is blaring with every alarm Stacker can recognise, and some he can’t. The kaiju keeps coming, and every piston feels as if it’s moving through cement as Stacker strains against the rig. He manages to charge and fire the EnergyCaster by sheer force of will, but he can feel the blood trickling out of his nose and the tears running down his cheeks, hot and strangely thick. The heavy thud of the kaiju hitting the ground slams up from his heels to the top of his skull, and it feels simultaneously as if it’s taken place very far away and as if the kaiju has taken Stacker down with it. He is barely aware of where he is—he’s heard the PPDC engineers say that Coyote is built to be driven by a single pilot, but if that’s true it’s certainly not built to bloody _feel_ like it—and yet he somehow does not lose sight of the single, red dot of the shoe amidst the dusty ruin of the street. Somehow.

 

He turns their head—Coyote’s battered machinery screams, and the tendons in Stacker’s neck shoot corresponding flares of fire down to his fingertips—and powers them down to standby. He jerks free of the feedback cradle. Another unfamiliar alarm starts making a racket. He imagines the engineers’ horrified faces and considers having a look at what he might have damaged before the fucking awful pounding in his head reminds him he couldn’t give a toss. Not right now.

 

He checks Tamsin’s pulse by hand and lets his eyes rove over the display with her vitals. She’s all right, and LOCCENT will have the medical teams move in now that the kaiju is down.

 

“Stacker?” she murmurs. Her eyes flutter open, but they’re unfocused when she looks at him.

 

“All right, Tam,” he says, half question and half reassurance. “You must have taken a knock to the head when it all started to go tits up. The rig might have jammed. Bent you ’round the wrong way. Fucker’s down. Just waiting for medical now.”

 

She furrows her brow: he can tell it doesn’t sound right to her, and it doesn’t sound right to him either. Tamsin’s not the type to go down any way but swinging. Thankfully he can see the steady, reassuring bleep of an incoming med chopper on the back-up data display next to her rig.

 

He looks between Tamsin’s face and the spot low on Tango’s Conn Pod, near where the head and shoulders couple into place. There’s a plate that’s not been welded quite right, and if you tilt your head at a precise angle it gives a view straight through the body armour and into the street below.

 

“You see something?” Tamsin asks. Her fingers are drifting over her screen, checking her own vitals. Her eyes are still more unfocused than Stacker would like, but she’s clearly in control.

 

“Not sure,” says Stacker, turning his attention back to her, but she shakes her head at him sharply and says,

 

“I’m fine. Vitals steady. Don’t know what that was. Go have a look.”

 

“Ranger Pentecost!”

 

It’s LOCCENT, no doubt trying to figure out what the fuck just happened. From the tone of voice coming through the comm link, Stacker gathers they’ve been shouting for quite some time. He meets Tamsin’s eyes again, and as she shakes her head at him again— _Go_ , far less patient this time—Stacker makes what he will later justify in his report as a “strategic decision.”

 

“Ranger Pentecost, sitrep. Medical support incoming. Ranger Pentecost, report.”

 

Stacker ignores the voice coming from the speaker and opens the exit hatch. He levers himself up and out and breathes in a lungful of dust, immediately coughing it back out.

 

He searches the street for the familiar shape of the shoe: it’s there. And then suddenly—though it seems impossible that Stacker could have tracked the shoe and not the tiny hands that cradled it—so is she.

 

____

 

The scientists arrive to butcher the kaiju apart, and a few cautious men and women begin to filter past the barricades; once the danger is past, most people can’t resist their curiosity. The choppers arrive to take Tamsin to the Shatterdome medbay.

 

They take the child away, too: Stacker glimpses her head in the crowd, and he’s able to catch the nametag on the uniform that takes her away. _Fujimori._ Stacker files it away almost without meaning to, gaze catching on the sharp creases of the lieutenant’s jacket and the child’s tear-streaked cheeks as she looks back at him over the soldier’s shoulder.

 

Her arm moves, almost as if to wave at him, but she seems to catch herself mid-movement. Stacker keeps his eyes on her as she’s carried away, her little face strangely solemn. Her cheeks are wet but her eyes are dry.

 

He resists his own impulse to acknowledge her in some way, and an even odder compulsion to follow after her. She’s one of thousands wounded, and LOCCENT has already assigned some spot-faced cadet to follow Stacker around to make sure he gets back to the Shatterdome to submit his report asap. He’s insistent, like a midge on a hot day.

 

“All right, all right, fuck’s sake,” Stacker says. He looks away from where he last saw the girl and heads for the chopper toward which the cadet is gesturing.

 

Cadet Midge looks intensely relieved. Stacker tries to shake the nagging feeling pulling at the back of his neck, in the direction of the child. Unless her parents can be found, she’ll probably be taken in by an orphanage: that’s the way it goes these days. Stacker can’t possibly—

 

“Cadet,” he says, and Midge lurches upright as they take their seats in the chopper, as if it’s not Stacker but God himself calling him to attention.

 

“Sir!”

 

“Lieutenant Fujimori, Japanese army,” Stacker says. “She was here with the first response team. I’ll need her information once we’ve returned to the Shatterdome.”

 

Midge looks perplexed, but Stacker looks right at him, not giving an inch. Much better and stronger men have failed to keep Stacker’s gaze, and Cadet Midge is no different. Stacker waits for him to lower his eyes, then stares for a moment longer to make a point. When Midge is sufficiently cowed, Stacker allows himself to turn to look out the chopper bay.

 

Tokyo smokes steadily below them. It looks nothing like the city Stacker knows, and yet everything like the landscapes he has come to expect since joining the PPDC—first through simulator displays, now spread out in a dreadful, dusty sprawl below the chopper. Stacker’s home is thousands of miles away, but he feels a fierce protectiveness over the people rushing in the streets below. Tokyo is his and Tamsin’s Shatterdome: these coasts, these buildings, these men and women are his.

 

That girl is one of his.


End file.
